I have a lot of pet peeves. In fact, all I have are pet peeves. Just ask my wife. She’ll tell you that I’m a walking complaint department.

She’ll also tell you that my biggest pet peeve is poor customer service. And that’s a big problem for me because there is no customer service these days. I know you feel my pain. Whether you’re waiting for a catatonic checkout girl at the supermarket or trying to weave your way through an automated telephone maze, finding anyone who actually knows what he or she is doing is nearly impossible.

It’s gotten so bad that if I deal with anyone who’s even remotely competent, I make sure to tell a manager so that person’s competence will be recognized. (Of course, that’s assuming the manager is competent enough to care - a big assumption.) I’ll give a 35 percent tip to a waitress who does a nice job. I’ll go out of my way to tell a good phone agent how much I enjoyed dealing with him.

Which brings me to what happened last week. Talk about your customer service nightmares. It was actually the perfect storm because it combined poor customer service with my other major pet peeve - security overkill.

All I wanted to do was buy a new camera for my wife’s birthday. I tried to buy the camera from a popular online store, one which acts as a middleman between the customer and the store that physically stocks the merchandise. But after making the purchase, the online store informed me that they couldn’t finalize the deal because my shipping address was different from my billing address. (I wanted to ship it to work so my wife wouldn’t see it.)

Apparently, they have a cockamamie security policy that requires the buyer to add any shipping address to their credit card account if that address differs from the billing address. Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? Let me get this straight… to protect my security, they want me add somebody else’s address to my credit card account? What if I buy 20 gifts for 20 different people? Am I supposed to add all 20 addresses to my account? Would anyone do that? Would you do that?

That’s the question I asked the online store’s customer service representative on the phone. He couldn’t answer it. Nobody could. And not only that, they were rude to me. They passed me back and forth and told me their supervisors weren’t available. I won’t bore you with the rest of the details, which involve me yelling at several people, including myself.  Suffice to say the purchase never went through. I later found out the camera store didn’t even stock the camera I was trying to buy. Big surprise, right?

The moral of this story is… um, I’m not really sure what the moral is. All I know is I’m just looking for a few good customer service people. Just a few. Even one would be nice. And stop it with all the crazy security precautions already. I don’t want to create an online password that contains four capital letters, two lowercase letters, 16 numbers and three ancient Sanskrit symbols. Nobody needs that much security. 

If you want to share your customer service horror stories, drop me a line at egreenberger@fox28.com. Who knows? We might do a story about it.

And if you’re my waitress, make it snappy. It’ll be worth your while! 

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